Trump and Musk Keep Spouting Bogus Numbers to Hide Their Real Agenda

Not only was that $8
billion complete bunk; turns out, so were the next three highest “savings” claimed
on the site. DOGE professed to find another $1.9
billion in savings from terminating three contracts for USAID, each for
$655 million. But these contracts were what are known as Indefinite Delivery
Vehicles, or IDVs. Such contracts allow the government to set spending limits
but do not require it to meet those limits, meaning that it can cancel the
contract at will. So far, the government had spent only $55 million of that
$1.9 billion.

It’s worth noting that
spending on USAID—which Musk called “a criminal
organization” and the Trump administration has unilaterally (and possibly
illegally) shut down—is not wasted money, but brings tangible
benefits, including providing HIV treatments in Africa, countering Russian
propaganda, and aiding civilians devastated by war in Syria and Ukraine. It’s
our best tool for soft power, burnishing America’s image around the world by
providing material help where it’s need most. And despite Donald Trump’s claim
that “billions of dollars have been stolen” by the organization, former USAID
Administrator Andrew
Natsios told 60 Minutes
that it is “the most accountable aid agency in the world,” with 40 percent of
the staff, he estimated, made up of lawyers and accountants tasked with
watching every dollar. 

The administration has
also made the suspect claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social
Security benefits. Musk said
it “might be the biggest fraud in history” even shared a graph on X
purporting to show this, apparently believing that everyone at the Social
Security Administration was so stupid as to not recognize that the agency was
sending out more than 5 million checks to people past the age of 140. Yet the
only fool in the equation was Musk. Neither he nor Trump, who repeated the
claim, appear to understand that while there are millions of people still in
the Social Security database because their deaths were never recorded, these
people do
not receive checks. A total of 89,000 people 99 years old and over receive
checks, which, unsurprisingly, aligns remarkably well with the U.S. Census
estimate that there are 85,000 people 100 and over in the country. Simply
checking a list of Social Security check recipients would have cleared up the
entire issue. Yet Musk was either too dumb or too lazy to do so. Or, perhaps
more likely, he just didn’t care if it was true or not because it served his
purposes.